Nine-headed monster wins Paderborn

2/15/2004 – Hydra, described by its authors as a program that will "corner in a bloody confrontation whoever crosses its path", justified this frightening image by winning the computer tournament in Paderborn outright. Second on the table was Fritz and third Shredder. Here are the results and games, and further information on a blood-curdling program.

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Hydra won this computer tournament with an almost-perfect score of 6.5/7,
followed by Fritz with 5.5 and Shredder with 5.0. Hydra dropped just half a
point against Shredder, which lost to Fritz (which lost to Hydra).

The Paderborn venue, we learn from the home page of the organisers, is located
51' o 43 ' latitude north by 8' o 45 ' longitude east, 94 to 347 metres above
sea level. Paderborn is one of the main centers in the East of Northrhine-Westphalia
with about 130.000 inhabitants. the name is made up of two words: Pader is
the name of the river that rises in the center of the town, and Born is a German
word for spring or source. Over 200 springs in the city center provide the
River Pader with its water. It is the shortest in Germany (4 km long).

The recorded history begins in the year 777 AD. The Emperor Charlemagne held
the first Imperial Council "on Saxon soil" in Paderborn. It then
followed a long and diversified history for the city. Different sovereigns
(Franconian, Prussian), war conflicts, religious changes (Reformation, Counter-Reformation)
influenced the development of Paderborn.

From the first Westphalian University founded in 1614 nothing remained when
in 1972 the former Teacher Training and Technical Colleges of Paderborn, Höxter,
Meschede and Soest became the new Paderborn University with its over 17.000
students. A well-known focus in research and education lies on computer sciences
from Theory to Practice. A strong scientific community with several interdisciplinary
institutes has been founded in the last years.

During the last 30 years, Paderborn has become one of the leading German centers
for Computer Technology. This development is closely connected with the name
of Heinz Nixdorf.

Program

Country

Author

1.

Ikarus

Germany

Muntsin Kolss, Munjong Kolss

2.

Comet

Germany

Ulrich Türke

3.

Diep

Netherlands

Vincent Diepeveen

4.

Fritz

Germany

Frans Morsch, Mathias Feist

5.

YACE

Germany

Dieter Bürssner, Carlos Pesce

6.

Quark

Germany

Thomas J. Mayer

7.

Patzer

Germany

Roland Pfister

8.

Hydra

UAE

Chrilly Donninger, Ulf Lorenz, Erdogan Günes (book),
Alex Kure

9.

Shredder

Germany

Stefan Meyer-Kahlen

10.

Anaconda

Germany

Frank Schneider, Kai Skibbe

11.

Gandalf

Denmark

Steen Suurballe, Dan Wulf

12.

Matador

Germany

Stefan Knappe

13.

BlackBishop

Germany

Andreas Herrmann

14.

SOS

Germany

Rudolf Huber

15.

Isichess

Germany

Gerd Isenberg

16.

The Baron

Netherlands

Richard Pijl

Hydra

The name Hydra is derived from the Greek mythology in allusion to the nine-headed
monster that entered into duel with Hercules. Here it refers to a powerful
chess software launched by a UAE-based company, PAL Group. It is essentially
Brutus,
the FPGA hardware program originally developed by ChessBase and parallelized
by experts at the University of Paderborn. The team consists of Chrilly Donninger,
Alex Kure and Ulf Lorenz. The book author is Erdogan Günes. The Hydra
web site, which is still under construction, does not hold back with blood-curdling
language.

"Hydra, the monster of the chessboard, will corner in a bloody confrontation
whoever crosses its path. Hydra is planned to attach the chess world in four
versions: Orthus, Scylla, Chimera and the final Hydra. All mentioned chess
monsters related to counterparts in the Greek mythology. Orthus, hideous
two-headed dog, guarded the cattle of Geryon and terrified anyone who dared
to approach. Chimera, a monster with the head of a lion, the body
of a goat and the tail of a dragon, ravaged the city it dwelt in. Scylla,
a sea monster with six dog heads, lived in a cave. Scylla attacked sailors
and terrorized them to the bones.

The chess software will then reach its optimal form through Hydra, which
will face the chess population with a nine-headed force of strategy and speed.
A massive and poisonous serpent, Hydra’s nine heads were indeed a primary
source of fear. Every time one head was injured, another two grew in its place.
The ascending numbers of heads of the above-mentioned monsters will match the
strength of the programs themselves, thus crushing competing human and non-human
rivals.

Are you up to this multi-headed challenge? Are you prepared to face unrivalled
strength and monstrous duels? In ancient times, legendary monsters were defeated
by human heroes, like Hercules, Achilles, and Odysseus. Today, the monsters
are back on the chessboard. Only this time, we created them."

Fritz

Fritz is a product of ChessBase GmbH, Hamburg (Germany). The program is built
around a selective search technique known as the null-move search. As part
of its search, Fritz allows one side to move twice (the other side does a null-move).
This allows the program to detect weak moves before they are searched to their
full depth. Move generators, evaluation functions and data structures have
been designed to maximize the effectiveness of the null-move search. Fritz
is the winner of the previous computer chess world championship in Hong Kong
1995. In 1993 Fritz tied for 1st place in a Blitz tournament in Munich with
the complete world elite. It scored the best computer result in the 1996 man-computer
Aegon tournament. In 1998 Fritz won an active chess tournament in Frankfurt
with a full point ahead of 36 grandmasters.

Shredder

Shredder is the winner of the 9th WMCCC and the 9th IPCCC 2000 in Paderborn.
it started in 1995 as a project at university. Good tournament and test results
encouraged the author, Stefan Meyer-Kahlen, to spend more work in it and lead
to the winning of the 1996 WMCCC in Jakarta. Shredder has been commercially
available since then and continued to perform very well in computer chess championships.
It is written in ANSI-C and therefore it can easily be compiled on various
hardware platforms. Shredder is distributed by ChessBase.

See also

3/27/2018 – Sergey Karjkin didn't succeed in posing serious problems for Ding Liren and after, what he called, a "terrible blunder", he had to scramble to save a draw. That left Caruana in great shape to win the tournament. Mamedyarov struggled to find winning chances with black against Kramnik, but in the end that game ended drawn as well. Caruana, needing only a draw, was in command against Grischuk and even won the game to finish in clear first by a full point! | Photo and drawings by World Chess

See also

1/28/2018 – Magnus Carlsen won the 80th Tata Steel Masters which was decided in a blitz tiebreak over Dutch number one Anish Giri. The players contested two blitz games with 5 minutes plus 3 seconds per move, with no sudden death Armageddon game needed. Vidit played solidly to earn a draw that was enough to win the Challengers, as Korobov could not manage to pull off a win with black on-demand. | Photo: Alina l'Ami TataSteelChess.com

Video

The setup for White recommended by Valeri Lilov is solid and easy to play – the thematic moves are almost always the same ones: Nge2, 0-0, Bg5 (or Be3), Nd5, Qd2. Later, according to Black’s setup, things continue with f4 or even Rac1, b4 and play on the queenside. Starting with the classic Botvinnik-Spassky, Leiden 1970, the author describes this universally employable setup in 7 videos (+ intro and conclusion).